Alternative housing model: Heidelberg Heights SDA
Sophie Dyring, Schored Projects

Heidelberg Heights Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) highlights how an ‘ethic of care’ can deliver more appropriate and affordable housing for people with complex and higher needs.

Heidelberg Heights demonstrates innovation in the design, delivery and management of SDA and provides insights and evidence into the barriers and solutions for this specific housing type.

Our discussion with Sophie highlighted how a deep understanding of residents' needs and lived experience underpins good design, along with the importance of looking beyond business-as-usual approaches to delivering institutional dwellings to create homely environments that do not draw attention to disability.

Sofia: How did the project aspirations drive the project outcomes and why is de-institutionalising SDA so important?

Sophie: The main aspiration was to illustrate that, through good design, specialist disability housing could be a homely environment and not institutional — that it could feel like someone's home and to the degree that it can be done, a very personalised home to them. It is somewhat difficult in SDA because notionally, we have two clients — the asset owner and the resident — with different ideas of what home looks like. For a resident, homely means having the opportunity to express their own ideas about what a home looks and feels like. Whereas the owner wants a home that is appealing to a broader audience so that it is easily rentable and not vacant.

It’s also important to avoid obvious markers of disability like handrails and tactile indicators, particularly outside. We worked really hard to remove that disability language from the project, by developing solutions that allowed us to remove things such as line marking for disability car parking and bollards. De-stigmatising SDA and social housing is very important to residents as they want to feel like everyone else and not as ‘other’. By removing obvious signs that housing is SDA, neighbours and people walking in the street don’t have access to private information about the residents.

The idea of providing homely environments is also evident in Disability Homes Victoria’s policy that no more than three residents live together. Their long-term goal is to replace all of the group homes of four to six bedrooms with no more than three bedrooms, thereby scaling down the size of disability accommodation.

The development was close to where the residents previously lived. Why was it important for the residents to remain in their neighbourhood and is this more important for persons with disability?

Depending on how long you've lived in a place, you're embedded in that community. But I think it's more important for persons with disabilities because their social exclusion is amplified. If they've been living in a community for a long time, they have a day program that they're going to. They might know the person at the local coffee shop. Their partner, friends and family knows how to get to them. They know the public transport system. So it's very important that people with disabilities have the choice to remain in a neighbourhood that they've lived in.

There were many different people and organisations involved. How were the various stakeholders instrumental in delivering a successful design outcome?

Disability Homes Victoria worked hard during the design and delivery phase to find a balance between custom and standardised design solutions to ensure that public money was spent as effectively as possible. The occupational therapists determined the residents’ functional capacity including insights into the residents’ conditions, which became important design tools. The Supported Independent Living (SIL) disability service provider, Able Australia, determined the number of On-site Overnight Accommodation (OOA) staff and spaces required, and advised on how they could better deliver their services in the dwellings and OOA spaces. The five residents, their families and carers provided input into their needs throughout the design process.

These conversations gave us a much deeper understanding of the residents’ and care staff needs, provided a more nuanced understanding of what home means to different people, and created a sense of ownership for residents. I think the most important outcome that we always want to achieve are happy residents. They're thrilled with their new home. I think this is because they participated in the process. It's important to the residents to feel like they've been heard. Enabling that participation and learning from lived experience underpins good design outcomes.

How does Specialist Disability Accommodation support the idea of home and how can it enhance a resident’s agency?

For residents of SDA, it is important to have choice and control over their lives which applies to with whom and where they live, how they are supported to make decisions, and how their home can accommodate changes in their health or circumstances, including ageing in place. Residents of SDA housing can spend a lot of time at home so having multiple spaces to go to other than their bedroom is important. For the units shared by two residents we included two separate living spaces, semi-private courtyards, laundry and clothes-drying area, and a communal courtyard. Altogether, these spaces provide residents with a variety of places for different activities and balance the need for privacy with social interaction. The addition of the OOAs on-site, ensures residents have access to services which support their independence and ability to connect with those they live with and external programs they attend.

When we were meeting with the residents and talking to their carers, there were conversations about physical health deteriorating. Even though only one resident is in a wheelchair at the moment, it is possible that at some point in the future all of the residents might end up needing a wheelchair. We designed all of the units for wheelchair access and included some provision for upgrades to suit future needs.

What are some of the design considerations practitioners need to be aware of when designing SDA to ensure that they are designed for diverse needs?

When we started working on the project, some of the parameters were pre-determined, such as the number and composition of units, and the number of OOA staff and spaces. However, Disability Homes Victoria didn’t specify the housing typology. This was different to private developers who generally determine the housing typology because that relates directly to how much funding they and the resident will receive. In this project, the selected typology was an outcome of how many OOAs were needed, how they were going to be shared across the residents and where they were located. This is how we ended up with the general arrangement of one separate unit at the front of the site with a dedicated OOA, and two attached units at the back of the site with a shared OOA.

With OOA staff on site, it’s important to think of these homes as workplaces as well as residences. Depending on the needs of the resident, there could be staff there 24/7 or for specific periods depending on the residents’ needs. The OOA accommodation has a front door for staff and visitor access and includes private access to the residents units. We located one of the OOA spaces at the front of the site to have street presence and address, and as a safety measure, so that anyone coming to the site for the first time was approaching a front door to staff.

Each unit has been designed for a DeafBlind resident to support their independence. The key design features for people who are DeafBlind are legibility of the layout, straight lines and right angles for movement and sight lines, navigating or tracking incorporating changes in texture, high colour contrast and plant selection. These design decisions were crucial in enabling residents to orient themselves.

Did the regulatory environment create any challenges and what are the barriers and changes needed to support more innovative housing models for people with disability?

One of the barriers, particularly in the private market, is the alignment between residential typology and SDA that's driving finance. Most SDA being delivered by the private sector are speculative projects built to deliver the highest returns. That's a barrier because in the suburbs and away from centres, too much of one category consisting of 3-bedroom villas / duplexes / townhouses of high physical support is being produced. Another barrier for increasing housing diversity in apartment buildings is the quantity of floor area required for SDA which increases the cost and makes these apartments expensive to deliver.
There is a streamlined town planning approval process in Victoria for buildings classified as community care accommodation which reduced our program by twelve months. However, there are multiple, overlapping design guidelines and regulatory requirements that need to be met. Some of the requirements are also open to interpretation, particularly the National Construction Code. I would love for someone to do a piece of work to align all of these guidelines and requirements.

I'm from the school of evidence-based common sense. Everyone who saw our Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing said, ‘of course, it just makes sense’. We now have a body of research that supports the idea of common sense in building homes for people. I would support a similar research project on exemplar SDA projects that questions what design outcomes we want to achieve.

What might we achieve through the alignment of guides and regulatory requirements?

If the regulatory environment was aligned much time and money would be saved and it would go some way to streamlining the delivery of housing. Consultant teams spend a lot of time and energy on finding agreeable solutions to contradictory regulations. It can be a difficult, costly and a long process.

What are you most proud of and how can this project be used to inspire innovation by others in delivering SDA?

I’m really proud that Minister Blandthorn, the Minister for Disability came to see the project and there have been several open days to show other departments what can be achieved. We have proven that it is possible to design and construct beautiful, good quality, homely environments for quite low budgets.

It is important that we look outside of the business-as-usual approach to delivering institutional dwellings and focus on how design outcomes can be improved. Our client-side project manager played an important role within the department by championing the role of good design. She was instrumental in illustrating to Disability Homes Victoria the benefits of well-being that can be achieved. I think this project reinforces the value of applying universal design principles more broadly to make housing more accessible to a wider audience with diverse needs. Good design can meet those needs, provide beautiful environments and improve well-being without drawing attention to disability.

Encouraging innovation in SDA could be considered through the use of an awards system or a grading system, similar to the one introduced for aged care. SDA projects need to be elevated and given a design value and the design community seems to respond well to recognition and accolades. This might encourage more designers to think cleverly and strategically about SDA housing.

Increasing supply of SDA is being looked at by Disability Homes Victoria through the production of standard designs for typical suburban blocks. This is not a new idea, and it has been tested across all types of housing for decades. One of the issues with standard designs or prototyping, in my experience, is that standard designs never quite fit the specific conditions of a site. However, I know that some modular builders are also producing standard volumetric SDA homes. Architects working with modular builders could be the answer to scaling up innovative SDA housing.

Project team

Client: Disability Homes Victoria

Architect and Landscape Architect: Schored Projects (Sophie Dyring, Stephanie Burrows, Vishnu Hazell)

Builder: Williams Builders

Structural and Civil Engineer: Structcom

Services Engineer: NJM Design

Access Consultant: 3D Access

Fire Safety Engineer: VP Fire

Quantity Surveyor: Cost Control

Specialist DeafBlind consultant: Able Australia

Firstrate Consultant: Passivenergy

Flood Impact Assessment: WMS

Program

Residential: 3 dwellings

Specialist Disability Accommodation

1 x 1-bedroom unit (1 x Fully Accessible)

2 x 2-bedroom units (1 x High Physical Support at the front and 1 x Fully Accessible)

2 x overnight assisted accommodation

Communal spaces:

Central courtyard

Number of levels: 1 storey

Number of residents: 5

Number of staff: 3 / 2 bedrooms

Produced with the assistance of the Alastair Swayn Foundation